How to bring it home?

Wednesday

Dec 13, 2017 at 12:01 AM

Resolving some property title problems at Country Club of the Poconos "villages" could be as simple as filing corrective paperwork, but it will likely take nothing short of major legal action and/or complex negotiations to address the most serious issues.

David Pierce

Resolving some property title problems at Country Club of the Poconos "villages" could be as simple as filing corrective paperwork, but it will likely take nothing short of major legal action and/or complex negotiations to address the most serious issues.

Big Ridge Developers, the current general managing partner of Country Club, might start by complying with its own requirement for providing detailed deed descriptions — metes and bounds coordinates showing the location and size of individual housing units — for every "townhouse" built at the gated community.

Those requirements are spelled out in the mapped plans that Mid-Monroe Development Corp., the original developer of Country Club, submitted for Middle Smithfield Township approval in 1989, and in the approved revised plans since then. The requirements are also filed with the Monroe County Recorder of Deeds office.

The plans state that building corners must be surveyed and "field located" after the buildings are constructed, that those coordinates must be stated in every deed sold to individual buyers, and that copies of those deeds must be filed with the township.

Current deeds issued to Country Club of the Poconos buyers don't provide any metes and bounds property descriptions, but merely reference the book and page number for the map plans that include the structure. In other words, the buyers are asked to look up and view the map to see what they bought.

Yet at least some of the maps fail to provide location coordinates, leaving the size and location of what people bought subject to wide speculation, competing recollections of verbal promises, and the intent and veracity of disclosures in contracts that have never been publicly filed.

Big Ridge Developers, the current managing partner for Country Club of the Poconos, could go a long way toward resolving some problems by surveying building locations in all the village areas and recording the resulting metes and bounds descriptions in new corrective deeds.

In fact, limited coordinates for two corners of each building — based on a Pennsylvania assessment mapping system — are already spelled out in revised plans for Hawthorne Village, with designated buyers' lots encompassing the "footprint" under each building. Those plans indicate that Hawthorne buyers' lots consist of the land under their dwellings.

At least some buyers at another cluster housing area called Aspen Commons are also told they bought lots consisting only of the land under their homes, yet the Aspen map doesn't provide any coordinates whatsoever showing the size and location of individual lots.

Big Ridge Developers has ignored every interview request since mid-2005 to discuss this or any other aspect of the development.

But operators of Mid-Monroe Development, the former Country Club of the Poconos developer that is a subsidiary of Resorts USA, contend that all buyers at Aspen Commons purchased the "footprint" land under their dwellings as their individual lots. They maintain that Aspen Commons — though initially planned in 1989 as a townhouse area to be called Woodfern Village — wasn't meant to be a "townhouse" in the revised Aspen plans filed in 1997.

Mid-Monroe maintains that Aspen Commons is a single-family home community, with each buyer's lot — the ground they actually own — consisting merely of the land underneath their structures.

If so, the current developer could survey the Aspen Commons buildings, and record those measurements in a new plan and in corrective deeds for each buyer.

Hunt Club Village, another Country Club of the Poconos area consisting of multi-family buildings, is clearly acknowledged to be a "townhouse" project. And the developers' own plans call for follow-up surveys after townhouse construction, to determine the precise location and size of individual units, in the form of metes and bounds coordinates based on the location of a "baseline" depicted on earlier maps.

"Metes and bounds must be indicated in the unit deed locating the two said building corners with respect to the baseline," states the condition recorded in both the original and revised sets of plans. "The deed for each unit must also include a description locating the unit within the building with respect to the building foundations plan and locating the building within the property, and a copy of the deed must be filed with the township and the recorder of deeds."

An examination of individual deeds and other documents filed with the county and the township show that Country Club of the Poconos hasn't complied with those requirements.

Resorts USA CEO Andy Worthington says those provisions appear to apply only after construction of townhouse buildings are completed. Worthington said when Resorts USA sold Country Club in October 2000, some units at Hunt Club and other townhouse areas were probably unfinished — so the location coordinates weren't yet required.

C.W. "Mickey" Schrenk and Robert Pritz of Big Ridge Developers, current managing partner of the community, haven't returned calls for comment. But a private engineer and one-time Resorts USA employee who has been intimately involved in development plans for nearly every phase of Country Club, Bryan Fisk, did comment after being asked during a January meeting of the Middle Smithfield Township supervisors whether the developer is legally required to file new maps and new deeds showing location coordinates.

"It depends. I've seen it done both ways," Fisk replied. "You need it if a unit is destroyed and you want to rebuild it. In this case, you'd have other units as a reference point to locate it."

Township supervisors and officials referred inquiries to Timothy McManus, an attorney who is solicitor for the Middle Smithfield Planning Commission. McManus read the stated requirements and agreed, in his e-mail reply, that metes and bounds should have been stated in every deed.

"In my experience, this is standard operating procedure for the conveyance of properties where only the building footprint is being sold, the building is not in existence at the time the subdivision/development plan is approved, and no metes and bounds description of the footprint is set forth on the recorded plan," McManus wrote.

McManus said the absence of such descriptions "appears to be more of a title concern for buyers of those properties" than an issue relating to the township's plan approval process.

"However, since, according to the language reference by a Pocono Record reporter, the township is to be provided with a copy of these deeds for its records, perhaps a request should be sent to the developer to supply the same if that has not already been done."

Middle Smithfield Supervisors Chairman Scott Schaller, who took office in January, said he is likely to make such a request to the developer.

Merely providing the boundaries won't solve all the problems, though, since at least some Aspen Commons buyers said they were misled into believing they were buying larger lots, perhaps an eighth-acre each, and not just the ground under their buildings. Only a credible investigation by the Monroe County District Attorney's Office, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office, and/or the AG's Office in New York, where the Country Club home packages were heavily marketed, can determine what happened, assess responsibility and pursue justice.

Failing that, residents might have to pursue their own private civil suits, or seek private negotiations with past and present developers.

Or, perhaps, individual buyers who think they have a clear legal basis for knowing what they own, could file a court document seeking "quiet title" to the precise property location through a court filing. It is called quiet title because, absent any objection from another party with a vested interested in the property, title can be obtained through the court filing coupled with publication of a legal notice and some sort of recorded effort to contact any party that might have a competing claim.

If a competing claim is filed, then it would be up to the parties, and a perhaps the courts, to sort it out.

Determining precisely what happened at Country Club of the Poconos and why will go a long way toward dictating solutions.

If the residents paid for something they didn't receive, then they might be entitled to financial compensation representing the difference, at time of sale, between the value of a townhouse and of a single-family home. Or at least some residents might want the land they contend they were initially promised.

How the title issues are resolved have other implications, such as ultimate responsibility and compensation for back taxes paid by the developer on large land tracts that might encompass the cluster village areas but, apparently, were assessed to individual buyers through their private community dues.

Since the 2000 sale of Country Club, the current developer has deeded some of these tracts to a property owners association created by Big Ridge Developers, and won agreement from the Monroe County Assessment Office to call them "common open space" and not to tax those areas. But for several years, those larger tracts were taxed. Also, since the deeds and maps never separated most of the village buildings with individual locations coordinates, perhaps even the ground under those dwellings was signed over to the property owners association.

There are additional title issues tied to the way Country Club of the Poconos was established, including the wording of the original covenants and restrictions for the development that are radically different from similar documents for other private gated communities in Pennsylvania. This includes language that appears to vest permanent ownership of large tracts of land with the developer and ban formation of a property owners association to manage Country Club. Despite the 1989 declaration, a property owners association has been formed. Big Ridge Developers struck deals to create two additional private communities within the boundaries of what was originally to be part of Country Club. It has yet to be fully explained to individual buyers how the three communities will share financial responsibility for maintenance of roads, utilities and other shared facilities. There also are potential legal implications of redrawing housing and land use boundaries in late 1992, after initial buyers bought building sites as early as 1989, based on previous plan promises. A host of legal and tax implications are related to the golf course that was once touted as a major buyer amenity. Parts of the course were once declared part of the community's common shared open space, but it is privately owned by the developer and marketed to the general public outside of Country Club. Some single-family home sites might encroach onto the golf course open space.

Have buyers previously, or are they now paying for the golf course's operation through the development's maintenance dues, and have they ever been stuck with at least part of the tax bill for the golf course? Past and present developers have never designated — nor has the assessment office ever required for tax purposes — that the golf course property be separated from other Country Club property, perhaps with a separate golf course name from the name of the Country Club development's managing partners. Most tax numbers tied to the golf course actually include large undeveloped land that has been routinely subdivided as new phases of Country Club home construction begin.

Numerous land transfers, mortgages and easements have been filed using incorrect property tax numbers, attributing those transactions to the wrong pieces of ground.

It will take a Herculean effort involving all the parties, driven by federal, state and local regulators and enforced by the courts, to sort it out.